← Compared to What?

The Compared to What standard

The rules this book was written under — and every future book in the series will be.

I

Primary sources first

Court filings, regulator findings, the blockchain itself. Secondary summaries only where nothing primary exists.

II

Like-for-like, always

Same year, same categories, both sides of every comparison. No number whose denominator picks the winner — even when it would flatter the argument. Especially then.

III

Legal precision

Charged is not convicted. A settlement is not an admission. Attribution verbs are never stronger than the record, in any language the book appears in.

IV

Verdicts fall where the evidence falls

The scoreboard is mixed because reality is. A book in which one side won every chapter would be a brochure, whoever the side.

V

Nothing asks to be believed

Load-bearing claims ship with their artifacts. The verification index puts each one next to the public record that checks it.

VI

Corrections are public

Found errors are fixed upstream in the research catalogue first, then published as errata, credited to their finders. Transparency beats the pretense of perfection.

VII

The book sells nothing

No URLs, no products, no calls to action inside the text. The reading is the whole product. The funnel lives here, outside the covers — never inside them.

"Compared to what?" is not just the title. It is the test every claim passes before it is printed: nothing is evaluated in isolation.